In portable telephone systems such as PDC (Personal Digital Cellular Telecommunication System) known as analog or digital cellular systems, or PHS (Personal Handy-Phone System), a portable telephone set carried by a user rings to alert the user at the time of arrival of a call. Conventionally, the alert is made by beeping sound, but it has recently replaced by a melody tone because the beeping sound is a noise offensive to the ear.
The above-mentioned type of portable telephone set that sounds a ringing melody pre-stores music data representing two or more ringing melodies, so that the user can select a desired ringing melody. The user may also access a service center from the portable telephone terminal set to download music data for desired ringing melodies from the service center. Further, some users have desired to create music data for use as their original ringing melodies, so some portable telephones have recently offered the users the capability of creating music data for ringing melodies.
Now, most recently developed portable telephones are provided with music reproduction means capable of reproducing music data composed of two or more parts. In this case, a ringing melody may be formed of music tones in two or more of a melody part and accompaniment parts. If the melody is derived from one melody part and three accompaniment parts, which are composed of a bass part and two chord parts, the music data will be data in four parts. Creating music data in four parts, however, requires the user to input data four times as much as those for the melody part alone, which results in an enormous amount of work. In addition, creating accompaniment data needs some knowledge of musical theory, so only a small percentage of the users can create music data in two or more parts.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a portable telephone apparatus with composition capability that allows anyone to create music data for ringing melodies without the need for the enormous amount of work.